#project td

Everyone, meet Cara Marie Juarez 🌴

This may be news to some of you, but I’m currently working on my very first novel! I’m writing my second draft now, and I’m super excited with how it’s going so far.

Cara Marie is one of two protagonists in my book — in total, there’s three POV characters: Cara Marie, Inés (protag #2), and Leon (deuteragonist).

I’ve honestly been scared to tackle art of these characters so far because I was worried I wouldn’t be able to “perfectly” capture how they look in my head, but I hit a breakthrough with Cara Marie, and now I’m excited to finally draw the others! I am 100% going to draw some mock ups of more Cara Marie outfits, this post here was just testing how I’ll draw her!

Read below the cut for some fun facts about Cara Marie and a synopsis for the story!

The Gif says it all, the comic is officially starting in mid-April!

I was going to release it sooner, but we are moving this week and I’ll need to re-situate my bedroom before I can realistically get to drawing full comic pages. If you have any specific questions please feel free to ask, we haven't gotten any questions or remarks on any Project TD posts thus far (it’s kinda discouraging tbh).

Minor Edit:

forgot to tag the people I know have a tumblr that I’ve thanked in this post!

@alainaprana and @segamew for helping me figure out how to comic

@breioom for being an amazing editor and friend

@idie970 for being an amazing and supportive boyfriend~

@thegrinningkitten and @little-noko for your kind words and moral support

For those who need the frames to stay put longer, here’s each frame of the announcement separated out for you~

Oh my, don’t these just look lovely?

and here’s two versions of the above two blended together;

More outfits for one of my two MCs, Cara Marie!

Look at her, I’m in love with her. She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?

All jokes aside, I’m really happy with how these all came out! Which is your favorite? I’ll definitely be making one of these for Inés, and maybe I’ll come back to these some day and render them ✨

And some more fun facts about Cara Marie:

- She prefers to wear black, or dark colors in general

- Her favorite color is green!

“Inés’ heart plummeted into the depths of her stomach.

She saw color. So much color. Glimpses of a vibrant green jungle, of white cliffsides that bordered either side of the shimmering green-blue body of water they fell towards, which was much closer than stomach. thought.

She folded her arms over her face, the ship disappearing in the distance toward the open sea, where the rocky borders ended.”

Sigh.

So this is part one of the final project I worked on for my digital art class for a few weeks straight resulting in no time for any other art, headaches, and staring at a screen for hours at a time.

This is a scene from Act 1 of my Project TD, in which my characters Inés and Cara Marie escape… from a place :) This was meant to be painted in the style of Arcane and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse with their mix of 2D and 3D animation, so the style is a bit different from what I usually do.

The trio is here!

Here are the main three characters from my novel in progress, currently untitled and under the project name “Tropical Dream.”

From left to right: Cara Marie Juarez, Inés Ortega, and Leon Aolin. They all have POVs but technically only the girls are the protagonists, while Leon’s the deuteragonist.

I can’t wait to share more, to paint scenes and environments and settings from the book (it’s largely tropical!), and I can’t wait to come up with a proper title, haha, which I aim to have by the end of the draft I’m completing now (the second one!)

Here’s the third POV character in my novel-in-progress — Leon Aolin!

I’ll be doing an outfits post for him as well like I did with Cara Marie and Inés. And as I’ve said before, while Leon is a POV character, he’s not a protagonist like the girls! Though he’s extremely important to the story and is even the reason why I’m contemplating a sequel 👀

Some fun facts about Leon that I can reveal without spoilers:

- He doesn’t like birds

- He’s a big fan of nature though, especially really tall trees he can climb

- He’s really good with directions and never gets lost

- He’s ambidextrous!

Here’s the second main character from my novel in progress, Inés Ortega!

She’s another of the three POV characters, but again, only her and Cara Marie are protagonists ✨

Some fun facts I can give about Inés without spoilers below the cut: